Characteristics of Money
On this page you will find everything that you need to know about the five primary characteristics of money. This will help you determine whether money is durable, portable, divisible, hard to counterfeit or easy to recognise. Durable. Money has to be durable in order to withstand all of the transfers it will surely go through. Handed from person to person almost constantly in shops, within families and businesses. If Australian bank notes were made of paper, they would surely be ripped and destroyed very quickly and easily. Instead, Australian banknotes are made from a plastic that is both extremely durable and incredibly lightweight. Made to withstand transactions through ATMS, being handles somewhat roughly by children and adults alike as it is being passed from person to person, the bank notes Australia has certainly tick the box for durability. The coins are extremely durable as well, made of metals that will not break if you drop them or do damage to them. They can be stored for long amounts of time in tills, wallets and pockets, and do not spoil, rot or get destroyed by age. Coins made in the late 1900s are still circulating in Australia as legal tender. If that doesn't suggest something about thir durability, I don't know what does. Portable. Money in Australia and most, if not all, countries in the world is extremely portable. If bank notes were extremely large, and not as lightweihght as they are toay, and coins were enormous and heavy, it would be cumbersome and time consuming just to move money from one place to another. Coins and notes are extremely lightweight in the monetary system of Australia, and half of the time you won't even ralise that you have money in your pocket or wallet. It's very simple to cary around money in Australia, as the coins and notes are easily portable and lightweight. Divisible Money is easily divisible, as it comes in small increments that can be used in exchange for goods of various values. This is another fault in the bartering system. If you wanted to buy some chewing gum, but you only had livestock, it is highly impractical to have to divide the cow into increments small enough to actually buy the chewing gum. This is easily solved by having small increments of money, like five cent coins and five dollar notes. If your total bill for something came to $67.10, you wouldn't have to pay with just one note, or cut up your cow into increments to shit that bill. You could pay with a fifty dollar note, a ten dollar note, a five dollar note, a two dollar coin and a ten cent coin, as just one of the possibilities. Hard To Counterfeit In order to sustain a steady and fully functional economy, it is essential that the money you are using is hard to counterfeit. If people are constantly manufacturing false money, after a while you won't even be able to tell which notes are real and which ones are. In Australia, our notes and coins have plenty of security features that will help determine whether a note or coin is legitimate or whether it is counterfeited. Some of these features include being printed on polymer, which is a type of plastic. This contributes to how hard it is to counterfeit the notes, and it also gives them a distinctive feel. A counterfeited note might be tinner or thicker than a genuine banknote. Paper will tear and crumple, whilst the banknotes won't if they are legitimate. There are clear windows on an Australian banknote, so make sure it doesn't look stuck on or cloudy. A real banknote has a clear window that will not be cloudy, and is continuous with the rest of the note. One a fifty dollar banknote, there is a white southern cross on the clear window. Make sure the white won't rub off. There is a shadow image of the shadow coat of arms that you should be able to see when it is held up to the light. Rub your finger over the picture or the banknote, and you will beable to detect a distant feel than paper on them, as this is called intaglio printing. Diamond-shaped patterns are printed inside a circle on both sides of a banknote. When a genuine banknote is held up to the light, the patterns should line up perfectly to form a seven-pointed star within the circle.